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Congressman Rohrabacher's floor speech on Global Warming

MAN-MADE GLOBAL WARMING
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Representative Dana Rohrabacher (CA-R)
United States House of Representatives
June 5, 2008

The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Courtney). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 18, 2007, the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher) is recognized for 60 minutes.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. First, I would like to identify myself with the remarks that I have just heard from my two colleagues, and congratulate them on presenting to the people the hard facts that have not been faced in this country for over 30 years. And those hard facts are some of the basic reasons that we are in trouble today. Mr. Speaker, I will preface my remarks tonight, and what I have to say tonight I would like to say totally is in parallel with the spirit of what was just said. But I preface my remarks to underscore, just as my colleagues would underscore their commitment.

While I adamantly reject the man-made global warming theory, I am committed to a clean and healthy environment, to purifying the air, to purifying our water and our soil, all of this for the sake of the people of this planet, especially the children of this planet, and especially my three children, Christian, Tristan, and Anika, and all the children of the world who we hope will receive a world that we hand them that will be a better world, a healthier world. And I have no doubt that unless we thwart the onslaught of the nonsense being foisted upon humankind in the name of man-made global warming, our next generation will be deprived of freedom, prosperity, and a healthy environment.

The radical environmental crusade behind the man-made global warming theory may well be well motivated. Motives and good intentions, however, do not count. What counts are facts. And when it comes to the facts about so-called manmade global warming, the public has been denied an honest debate.

Only 18 months ago, the refrain, ``Case Closed, Global Warming is Real,'' was repeated as if a mantra of some religious sect. It was pounded into the public's consciousness over the airwaves, in print, and even at congressional hearings. This was obviously a brazen attempt to end open discussion and to silence differing views by dismissing the need to take seriously contrary arguments by anyone, no matter how impressive his or her credentials might be, if that person happened to doubt global warming. Just a short time ago, the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, the OISM, released the names of some 31,000 scientists who signed a petition rejecting the claims of human-caused global warming. Of the 31,072 Americans who signed, 9,021 had Ph.D.s; many of the 31,000 signers currently work in climatology, meteorology, atmospheric, environmental, and geophysical studies, astronomical studies, as well as the biological fields that directly relate to the climate change controversy. And note, of the 31,000 signatories, these signers are American scientists. There are many prominent scientists throughout the world who are stepping up to expose the well-financed propaganda campaign behind the man-made global warming theory. But the views of these American scientists and those of so many scholars and scientists throughout the world don't count. The debate is over. It has been declared over. Al Gore has his Nobel Prize, and the film An Inconvenient Truth has its Academy Award. So shut up, case is closed.

So what is this theory that now is so accepted that no more debate is needed or even tolerated? Man-made global warming is a disturbing theory that the Earth began a warming cycle 150 years ago that differed greatly from all the other warming and cooling cycles in the Earth's primordial past. And over the life of this planet over the millions of years, there have been many, many such situations of warming and cooling, sometimes lasting 10 years, sometimes lasting hundreds of thousands of years, glaciers that went back and forth.

This warming cycle that we are now talking about and we are being told that it is unlike the warming cycle of all of those past warming and cooling cycles, this one we are told is tied directly to mankind's use of fossil fuels, as of course compared to all the other warming and cooling cycles even before mankind was present on the planet. Basically, they are saying that our use of fossil fuels, again, basically oil and coal, are causing the Earth's temperature to change; and they are blaming oil and coal, which happen to be fuels that have powered our industries and made modern civilization possible. Fossil fuels, we are told, are rapidly increasing the level of socalled greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, the most prevalent of these greenhouse gases being CO2, carbon dioxide. This increase in CO2 we are told causes the warming cycle we are now supposedly experiencing.

This man-made warming cycle, according to the theory, is rapidly approaching a tipping point when the world's temperature will abruptly jump and accelerate with dire consequences, perhaps apocalyptic consequences, for the entire planet. Well, that is basically the global warming theory.

For skeptics of this hypothesis, the consequences of accepting this theory are far more dire than any of the predicted rise in temperature predictions: We will live with the consequences of the social engineering being touted as necessary to prevent man-made global warming. It's a package. Accept the man-made global warming theory, and one is expected to accept the controls, regulations, taxation, international planning and enforcement, mandated lifestyle changes, the lowering of expectations, the limiting of consumer choice, and personal as well as family sacrifices that are necessary to save the planet from, well, from us.

It really takes a lot to frighten people into accepting such personal restrictive mandates that would result from implementing a global warming based agenda. People's lives will be changed if we accept this agenda as being real, and if we cave in to this onslaught of propaganda. People's lives will change, but it won't be a change for the better.

For example, jets are considered some of the worst CO2 polluters, according to the theory. So, how will our lives be different when low-priced airfares are eliminated? Let me repeat that. Low-priced airfares to be eliminated. How will that affect our lives? And how about the restricting the number of flights, themselves? How will that affect our lives?

Oh, I guess we never thought about that. Well, we never thought about that because those clamoring for us to accept the man-made global warming agenda never mentioned the price that we have to pay, not just in dollars, but in the freedom that we have today to make such choices in our lives, choices, for example, when and how many times we should travel with our families and where we should travel. What we do know about the man-made global warming fanatics is that they don't want us using our cars. They've hidden the fact about the airplane restrictions, but we do know they don't like us in our private cars. Private automobiles will be on the way out. They want us to be regulated into public transportation, and basically, we will have gone out of our cars and have limited air travel. But don't worry. Don't worry about it because the rich and high government officials will still have private jets, Suburbans and limousines, because they will just buy carbon credits, which Al Gore will arrange for them, and he'll arrange it for them at a tidy profit for himself, of course.

Global warming and global warming predictions appear to be designed to strike fear into the hearts of those malcontents, those of us malcontents who won't willingly accept these mandates and these changes in our lifestyle that will be demanded of us. And who, for example, among us, and we know that there will be people who just won't accept the idea that we have to have higher food prices; or they won't accept the fact that we need less meat in our diet.

A 2006 report to the United Nations entitled Livestock's Long Shadow focuses right on the hind parts of cows. Livestock, the report claims, accounts for 18 percent of the gases that supposedly cause the Earth's climate to change, the warming of the Earth's climate. Cows are greenhouse gas-causing machines, according to this report. Fuel for fertilizer and meat production and transportation, as well as the clearing of fields for grazing, produced 9 percent of the globe's CO2 emissions, according to the report.

Cows produce ammonia, causing acid rain. And if that's not bad enough, all these numbers that I just mentioned are projected, in this report, are projected in the report's computer models that they will double by the year 2050. So not only is it bad today to eat meat, it's going to be so much worse by 2050, we've got to act now to get meat out of the diet.

Not only are they going to cut our personal transportation, but we can't even stay at home and have a barbecue. Heck, they're not even going to let us have a hamburger.

I'd point out that before the introduction of cattle to the United States, millions upon millions of buffalo dominated the great plains of America. They were so thick that you could not see where the herd began or where it ended. One can only assume that the anti-meat, man-made global warming crowd must believe that buffalo farts have some social redeeming value that's better than the flatulence emitted by cattle.

I have to be very careful about such jokes. I was making light of this supposition at a hearing about a year ago. And I suggested, in jest, that perhaps dinosaur flatulence changed the climate back in those ancient days. Well, it was reported, widely reported as if I was serious, which demonstrates something that we should all understand about the global warming debate.

The global warming debate has been totally dishonest. Anyone who could suggest that I was saying that as a serious matter was either a fool, or was intentionally portraying something that they knew was not to be true. Yes, what we have here, of course, is steely-eyed fanaticism by those on the other side of this debate, and maybe they can't understand humor when they see it or hear it. Yes, this is an absurd theory to be talking about animal flatulence when we're talking about the future of the planet and the restrictions, massive restrictions on our way of life.

This would be absurd, but the deeper that one looks into this global warming juggernaut, the weirder this movement becomes, and the more denial in it is evident. Ten years ago, for example, alarmists predicted that by now we would be clearly plagued by surging temperatures. In testimony before Congress 20 years ago, NASA's global warming guru, James Hanson, predicted CO2 levels would shoot up the global temperatures by more than a third of a degree Celsius during the 1990s.

Well, we were warned that we'd soon be seeing rising sea levels. And you've all seen all of these predictions, rising sea levels, perhaps even our cities under water, drought and famine and increase in tropical diseases. Yeah, an increase in tropical diseases. Of course the only increase in tropical diseases we've seen can be directly traced to the success of environmental extremists in banning DDT, which has resulted in millions of Third World children dying of malaria, something else that they were wrong about.

So what about Hanson's and others predictions of imminent global overheating?

Well, forget case closed. The question needs to be answered. And the answer is that Hanson's and the other predictions have turned out to be dramatically wrong. Temperatures during this last decade rose only one-third of the predicted jump, a modest 0.11-degree change. Remember, Mr. Hanson has been so arrogant over the years that he has insisted that his opinions be emblazoned on government documents as the official position of NASA, rather than acknowledging that existing other opinions may be worthy of consideration. And now, we are finding out that the predictions made by Mr. Hanson, who doesn't want any other people's opinions even to be considered as part of an official NASA presentation, that this, Mr. Hanson and other self-anointed elitists have been wrong, dead wrong in their predictions of what should be happening right now. Over the years, we've been led to expect an increased number of even more powerful hurricanes, for example. There would also be drought and melting ice caps. My beautiful Sierra Nevada mountains in California were due to heat up, dry up, brown up and burn, burn, burn, and we've been told this for almost 20 years now.

During the entire Clinton administration, scientists produced study after study predicting the horrific impact of the unstoppable onslaught of man-made global warming, which we were all led to believe by those studies would be overwhelming us right now.

Of course, if there was even a hint that the conclusion of their research wouldn't back up the man-made global warming theory, the scientists and researchers wouldn't get one red cent from the Federal research pool during the Clinton and Gore administration.

In a September 2005 article from Discovery magazine, Dr. William Gray, now emeritus professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University and, more importantly, the former president of the American Meteorological Association, said that he had paid a price for his skepticism of man-made global warming. Quote, ``I had NOAA money for 30 years, for 30 some years,'' Dr. Gray said. ``And then, when the Clinton administration came in,'' and this is still part of the quote, ``and Gore started directing some of the environmental stuff, I was cut off. I couldn't get any money, any NOAA money. They turned down 13 straight proposals from me.''

Here's from one of America's great, eminent meteorologists, and the Clinton administration just kept turning him down because he had expressed some skepticism about whether man-made global warming was a reality. Dr. Gray made the mistake of being a skeptic about global warming. And however he was skeptic about that, that made him wrong with the Clinton administration.

But he was right about hurricanes which were being blamed on global warming. Remember, we were told that global warming was going to cause more hurricanes. And Dr. Gray, one of the great meteorologists, said there's no reliable data available to indicate increased hurricane frequency or intensity in any of the globe's seven tropical cyclone basins.''

So, with that type of skepticism, no matter what his credentials were, no matter how preeminent a scientist and respected scientist he was, he couldn't get a grant during the Clinton/Gore administration. So Dr. Gray was cut off. The predictors of gloom and doom were left to shout out their paranoid nonsense every time a hurricane was detected.

And just recently, one of those shouters, Tom Knutsen, research meteorologist for the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, that's NOAA, that's the ones who ended up not being able to give Dr. Gray any research grants, this gentleman, Mr. Knutsen, who was, during that time when Dr. Gray said there wasn't a relationship, he was a hurricane alarmist, suggesting there would be more and more hurricanes because of global warming, has now published a study in the Journal of Native Geoscience admitting that he was wrong.

For the record, he now says his studies indicate that warming is not to blame for more hurricanes, and that warmer temperatures, if they do come, will actually reduce the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic. He unequivocally stated that his most recent finding argues against this notion that we've already seen a dramatic increase in Atlantic hurricane activity resulting from greenhouse warming gases.

So here is a scientist with integrity. Dr. Gray, of course, was punished. He couldn't even get a research grant. But here we have a scientist who did get the grant and made wrong conclusions, but now he's stepping forward because he has integrity, to admit that he was wrong and now he has openly changed his mind.

Unfortunately, such scientific integrity did not always rise to the occasion. Perhaps it's because scientists saw the raw power exercised during the Clinton/Gore administration, which may well revisit us in the next administration if we don't watch out. But there was raw power being exercised. Al Gore's first act as Vice President was to insist that William Harper be fired as the chief scientist at the Department of Energy. Why? Because he had uttered some words indicating that he was open minded about the man-made global warming theory, just like Dr. Gray.

Well, anybody who talks about that way, off with his head. No more position for you. That was back in 1993, the first year of the Clinton-Gore administration. So for over a decade, all we got was a drum beat of one-sided research setting the stage for a false claim of scientific consensus that we heard 18 months ago. Case closed. Case closed. The argument is over. Global warming is real.

How many times did we hear that? Let us remember that refrain and how false it was and how dishonest it was. Unfortunately, for all of those scientists who went along with the scheme back in the 1990s, now over a decade later there is a big problem. Contrary to what all of those scientists living on their Federal research grants predicted, the world hasn't been getting warmer. In fact, for the last 7 years when we were told there would be this dramatic increase in temperature, there has been no warming at all. Last year was colder, not hotter. Snow levels were high, temperatures have been low, and there are fewer hurricanes.

Furthermore, while there is some melting in the Arctic, which we hear about over and over and over again about the melting in the Arctic, which we need to sort of compensate that and balance that off with the fact that there is an actual ice buildup in the Antarctic, which is almost never stated during